I mean, clearly he's needed to deliver California for the ticket!northland10 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 27, 2024 7:52 am McCarthy's on the list now? That'd be a hoot. The Freedumb Caucus would have a collective head explosion.
Gift link: https://wapo.st/3vmmmEPTrump calls his globe-trotting ex-diplomat ‘my envoy.’ Neither is in office.
Richard Grenell is meeting with far-right foreign leaders, attacking President Biden and offering a glimpse at what U.S. foreign policy could be like in a second Trump term
Grenell’s intervention highlights the extraordinary role he has carved out in the three years since Trump left the White House. From Central America to Eastern Europe and beyond, Grenell has been acting as a kind of shadow secretary of state, meeting with far-right leaders and movements, pledging Trump’s support and, at times, working against the current administration’s policies.
Is this not a Logan Act violation?pipistrelle wrote: ↑Thu Mar 28, 2024 3:52 pmGift link: https://wapo.st/3vmmmEPTrump calls his globe-trotting ex-diplomat ‘my envoy.’ Neither is in office.
Richard Grenell is meeting with far-right foreign leaders, attacking President Biden and offering a glimpse at what U.S. foreign policy could be like in a second Trump term
Grenell’s intervention highlights the extraordinary role he has carved out in the three years since Trump left the White House. From Central America to Eastern Europe and beyond, Grenell has been acting as a kind of shadow secretary of state, meeting with far-right leaders and movements, pledging Trump’s support and, at times, working against the current administration’s policies.
Ex-Trump adviser says former president ‘hasn’t got the brains’ for dictatorship
Despite disparagement from John Bolton, critics maintain Trump is clear threat to democracy, given admiration for dictators
Edward Helmore
Sat 30 Mar 2024 22.42 CET
A former national security adviser in the Donald Trump White House has said that the ex-president “hasn’t got the brains” to helm a dictatorship, despite his admiration for such rulers.
In an interview with the conservative French outlet Le Figaro, John Bolton, 75, was asked whether Trump had tendencies that mirror dictators like the ones he has previously praised. Bolton not only disparaged Trump’s intellectual capacity, he also disparaged the former president’s professional background, exclaiming: “He’s a property developer, for God’s sake!”
Now a vocal critic of Trump, Bolton served as the former president’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019. Bolton had previously served as US ambassador to the UN during George W Bush’s presidency, developing a reputation as a foreign policy hawk.
Bolton’s remarks to Le Figaro suggesting Trump is not smart enough to be a dictator will almost certainly do little to allay fears on the political left at home or abroad about a second Trump presidency.
After all, Trump has suggested he plans to be a dictator, if only for the first day of his presidency if he were re-elected.
Meanwhile, as seeks a second term in the White House, the incumbent Joe Biden has warned that Trump – the lone remaining contender for the Republican nomination – and his allies are “determined to destroy American democracy”. Trump recently provided fuel for that argument by hosting Hungary’s autocratic prime minister Viktor Orbán at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Trump, furthermore, is known to have lavished praise on leaders considered opposed to US democratic ideals and foreign policy interests, including North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and China’s Xi Jinping.
Bolton nonetheless claimed Trump – who is grappling with more than 80 pending criminal charges as well as multimillion-dollar civil penalties – lacks the kind of coherent political philosophy effective dictators require. He also said Trump does not like to “get involved in policy analysis or decision-making in the way we normally use those terms”.
For Trump, Bolton added: “Everything is episodic, anecdotal, transactional. And everything is contingent on the question of how this will benefit Donald Trump.”
Such disparagements from Bolton – who advocated for the Trump White House to withdraw from a deal with Iran aimed at dissuading it from developing nuclear weapons – are not new. In a new foreword to his account of his work for Trump’s presidency, The Room Where It Happened, Bolton warns that Trump was limited to worrying about punishing his personal enemies and appeasing US adversaries Russia and China.
“Trump is unfit to be president,” Bolton writes. And though he may not think Trump can foster a dictatorship, Bolton has warned: “If his first four years were bad, a second four will be worse.”
Trump has seemingly leaned into such predictions. He stoked alarm at a campaign rally earlier in March when – while musing about how foreign car production affects the US auto industry – he said: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ctatorship
HAPPY EASTER TO ALL, INCLUDING CROOKED AND CORRUPT PROSECUTORS AND JUDGES THAT ARE DOING EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO INTERFERE WITH THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2024, AND PUT ME IN PRISON, INCLUDING THOSE MANY PEOPLE THAT I COMPLETELY & TOTALLY DESPISE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA, A NOW FAILING NATION, LIKE “DERANGED” JACK SMITH, WHO IS EVIL AND “SICK,” MRS. FANI “FAUNI” WADE, WHO SAID SHE HARDLY KNEW THE “SPECIAL” PROSECUTOR, ONLY TO FIND THAT HE SPENT YEARS “LOVING” HER, LONG BEFORE THE GEORGIA PERSECUTION OF PRESIDENT TRUMP BEGAN (AND THEREBY MAKING THE CASE AGAINST ME NULL, VOID, AND ILLEGAL!), AND LAZY ON VIOLENT CRIME ALVIN BRAGG WHO, WITH CROOKED JOE’S DOJ THUGS, UNFAIRLY WORKING IN THE D.A.’s OFFICE, ILLEGALLY INDICTED ME ON A CASE HE NEVER WANTED TO BRING AND VIRTUALLY ALL LEGAL SCHOLARS SAY IS A CASE THAT SHOULD NOT BE BROUGHT, IS BREAKING THE LAW IN DOING SO (POMERANTZ!), WAS TURNED DOWN BY ALL OTHER LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES, AND IS NOT A CRIME. HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE!
Philly Boondoggle
That was just one of like 70 posts he put on TS yesterday. Clearly everyone was ignoring him
Philly Boondoggle
He has issues with days like Easter when there is a person and bunnies that are more important than him.
‘Building an authoritarian axis’: the Trump ‘envoy’ courting the global far right
Richard Grenell’s shadow foreign policy campaign is unsettling diplomats and threatens to collapse US interests
Robert Tait in Washington
Fri 5 Apr 2024 12.00 CEST
For Donald Trump, he is “my envoy”, the man apparently anointed as the former US president’s roving ambassador while he plots a return to the White House.
To critics, he is seen as “an online pest” and “a national disgrace” – and most importantly, the dark embodiment of what foreign policy in a second Trump administration would look like.
Meet Richard Grenell, vocal tribune of Trump’s America First credo on the international stage and the man hotly tipped to become secretary of state if the presumed Republican nominee beats Joe Biden in November’s presidential election.
A senior executive in the rightwing Newsmax cable channel, Grenell, 57, has crafted a persona as the archetypal Trump man, keen and ever-ready to troll liberals, allies and foreign statesmen in public forums and social media.
Grenell – who served as a rambunctious ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term – has carved a niche as the articulator-in-chief of a Maga approach to global affairs that appears to echo his political master’s voice.
Seasoned analysts fear his hyperactivity is already unsettling US diplomats even while Trump is out of office.
In recent months, he has pitched up in Guatemala, where he tried to stymie US state department pleas for a peaceful transition of power by backing rightwing efforts to block the inauguration of the liberal president-elect, Bernardo Arévalo, on supposed electoral fraud grounds about a poll previously declared “free and fair” by international observers.
Arévalo subsequently took office, but not before Grenell lambasted American diplomats for “trying to intimidate conservatives” over “a phony concern about democracy”.
He has also repeatedly visited the Balkans – building on a previous role as the Trump administration’s special envoy to the region and working on property deals in Serbia and Albania with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
He attempted to broker a meeting between Trump and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at last year’s United Nations general assembly in New York at a time when the Turkish leader was blocking Sweden’s bid to join Nato, although the proposal was subsequently rejected amid security concerns.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ign-policy
Trump’s bizarre, vindictive incoherence has to be heard in full to be believed
Excerpts from his speeches do not do justice to Trump’s smorgasbord of vendettas, non sequiturs and comparisons to famous people
Rachel Leingang
Sat 6 Apr 2024 12.00 CEST
Donald Trump’s speeches on the 2024 campaign trail so far have been focused on a laundry list of complaints, largely personal, and an increasingly menacing tone.
He’s on the campaign trail less these days than he was in previous cycles – and less than you’d expect from a guy with dedicated superfans who brags about the size of his crowds every chance he gets. But when he has held rallies, he speaks in dark, dehumanizing terms about migrants, promising to vanquish people crossing the border. He rails about the legal battles he faces and how they’re a sign he’s winning, actually. He tells lies and invents fictions. He calls his opponent a threat to democracy and claims this election could be the last one.
Trump’s tone, as many have noted, is decidedly more vengeful this time around, as he seeks to reclaim the White House after a bruising loss that he insists was a steal. This alone is a cause for concern, foreshadowing what the Trump presidency redux could look like. But he’s also, quite frequently, rambling and incoherent, running off on tangents that would grab headlines for their oddness should any other candidate say them.
Journalists rightly chose not to broadcast Trump’s entire speeches after 2016, believing that the free coverage helped boost the former president and spread lies unchecked. But now there’s the possibility that stories about his speeches often make his ideas appear more cogent than they are – making the case that, this time around, people should hear the full speeches to understand how Trump would govern again.
Watching a Trump speech in full better shows what it’s like inside his head: a smorgasbord of falsehoods, personal and professional vendettas, frequent comparisons to other famous people, a couple of handfuls of simple policy ideas, and a lot of non sequiturs that veer into barely intelligible stories.
Curiously, Trump tucks the most tangible policy implications in at the end. His speeches often finish with a rundown of what his second term in office could bring, in a meditation-like recitation the New York Times recently compared to a sermon. Since these policies could become reality, here’s a few of those ideas:This conclusion is the most straightforward part of a Trump speech and is typically the extent of what a candidate for office would say on the campaign trail, perhaps with some personal storytelling or mild joking added in.
- Instituting the death penalty for drug dealers.
Creating the “Trump Reciprocal Trade Act”: “If China or any other country makes us pay 100% or 200% tariff, which they do, we will make them pay a reciprocal tariff of 100% or 200%. In other words, you screw us and we’ll screw you.”
Indemnifying all police officers and law enforcement officials.
Rebuilding cities and taking over Washington DC, where, he said in a recent speech, there are “beautiful columns” put together “through force of will” because there were no “Caterpillar tractors” and now those columns have graffiti on them.
Issuing an executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.
Moving to one-day voting with paper ballots and voter ID.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... h-analysis
Philly Boondoggle 
I'm hoping it accelerates quickly.
Karl Rove Says If Biden Campaign Is Smart, It Should 'Go Hard' At 1 Trump 'Mistake'
The longtime GOP strategist, who's a Fox News contributor, played Democratic adviser for a moment in a "striking" interview.
Ron Dicker
Apr 4, 2024, 07:12 AM EDT|Updated Apr 4, 2024
Karl Rove, the GOP strategist who helped guide George W. Bush to two presidential victories, advised President Joe Biden’s campaign to “go hard” at Donald Trump’s embrace of the “thugs” who stormed the Capitol in 2021. (Watch the video below.)
“If they were smart, they’d take the January 6 and go hard at it,” Rove told MSNBC’s Ari Melber at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival in California earlier this year, in an interview that Melber aired parts of this week. “They would say, ‘He wants to pardon these people who attacked our Capitol.’”
Rove said the siege on Jan. 6, 2021, was “a stain on our history, and every one of those sons of bitches who did that, we ought to find them, try them and send them to jail.”
Rove, a Fox News political contributor, told Melber that Trump and his camp have committed a “mistake” for Democrats to exploit.
On Tuesday, Melber shared parts of the conversation on his show for the first time, calling it “pretty striking.”
“One of the critical mistakes made in this campaign is that Donald Trump has now said, ‘I’m going to pardon those people because they’re hostages.’ No, they’re not,” Rove said. “They’re thugs.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/karl-rov ... 580bc6c88a
I never thought that I would agree wholeheartedly with Bush's Brain, as Rove was called, back when he was in the WH.RTH10260 wrote: ↑Sun Apr 07, 2024 5:49 pmKarl Rove Says If Biden Campaign Is Smart, It Should 'Go Hard' At 1 Trump 'Mistake'
The longtime GOP strategist, who's a Fox News contributor, played Democratic adviser for a moment in a "striking" interview.
Ron Dicker
Apr 4, 2024, 07:12 AM EDT|Updated Apr 4, 2024
Karl Rove, the GOP strategist who helped guide George W. Bush to two presidential victories, advised President Joe Biden’s campaign to “go hard” at Donald Trump’s embrace of the “thugs” who stormed the Capitol in 2021. (Watch the video below.)
“If they were smart, they’d take the January 6 and go hard at it,” Rove told MSNBC’s Ari Melber at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival in California earlier this year, in an interview that Melber aired parts of this week. “They would say, ‘He wants to pardon these people who attacked our Capitol.’”
Rove said the siege on Jan. 6, 2021, was “a stain on our history, and every one of those sons of bitches who did that, we ought to find them, try them and send them to jail.”
Rove, a Fox News political contributor, told Melber that Trump and his camp have committed a “mistake” for Democrats to exploit.
On Tuesday, Melber shared parts of the conversation on his show for the first time, calling it “pretty striking.”
“One of the critical mistakes made in this campaign is that Donald Trump has now said, ‘I’m going to pardon those people because they’re hostages.’ No, they’re not,” Rove said. “They’re thugs.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/karl-rov ... 580bc6c88a
Philly Boondoggle
.
